It's free and Had the Cnet seal of approval. It also allows you to slow you effective cpu speed as a percentage of your total cpu speed.

So my theory is that mach 3 was tuned for a 1ghz processor, so my 1.5ghs box, needed to be slowed down to 1ghz. a factor of 33%.

I booted CpuKiller, set the slowdown to 33%, ran mach, and my pulse frequency was a steady as a rock above 25k.

I had already done a bunch of the optimization stuff and never got a good pulse frequency. Cpu killer and an effective CPU speed of 1ghz fixed my probelm.

Alternately I believe that EFFECTIVE pulse frequency needs to be 1ghz, or a multiple of 1ghz, i believe that mach can adjust a little, but if you exceed that limit, bad pulse frequency. But since my test machine was 1.5ghz, I was not able to test this theory out. The more software and interrupts you have running the more your effective cpu speed will differ from your advertised cpu speed.

I hope this helps someone who has the same problem.

If you try it and it does or does not work, try adjusting the slowdown up and down to see if your effective cpu is not your reported cpu speed, find the setting that works for you. Targeting 1ghz should be a safe first guess.

If you want to find out your effective cpu speed, go to a command prompt and type in dxdiag.exe , if you have DirectX installed it will bring up a ton of info about your machine including the advertised CPU speed (on the system tab),

Sorry if this is kind of rambling and disorganized, I'm in a blazing hurry.

Thanks for the help, hope this helps someene else.

Caladin/Eric-

p.s. There are lots of other slowdown programs, they may work too, Mo Slow was good back in the days of Wingcommander, when i last cared about slowign down a cpu.